Children beg to stay with dad in UK but judge says they must go to ‘penniless’ mum living in Australia

FOUR English children have been ordered by a judge to move to Australia, despite the fact they want to remain in Britain.

The siblings, aged nine to 13, all said they liked living with their wealthy father in the UK.

The father, a 38-year-old financial consultant, had recently taken his children on a £15,000 skiing trip and a £28,000 Middle Eastern holiday, the High Court heard.

But the judge ruled the youngsters must move to Australia to be with their ‘penniless’ mother – who is English but has a part-time job in a supermarket there – even though she has recently been evicted after falling behind with mortgage payments.

The family – who cannot be named for legal reasons – are all English, but they moved to Australia eight years ago. The parents separated after the father had an affair, and he returned to Britain. Last Christ- mas, the children flew to England to spend the two-month Australian school summer holidays with their father. At the end of the holidays, he informed their mother, also 38, that they would not be returning. She launched ‘child abduction’ proceedings and yesterday, after a six-month custody battle, it emerged that a judge has now ruled in her favour. The court referred to the children using the pseudonyms Harry, Peter, Clare and Simon.

Judge Clifford Bellamy interviewed the siblings personally and concluded they were ‘delightful children’ who ‘clearly’ wanted to stay in Britain. The court heard Harry had written his mother a letter saying: ‘You won’t listen when I try to talk. I don’t want to go back to Australia because I have friends and family here.’

Peter said he wanted to live in the UK ‘as he feels like a part of a big family in England’, whereas in Australia ‘it was just them and his mum’.

Simon said he would feel ‘awful’ if they returned to Australia, adding that ‘he did not want to sound mean, but being around his dad had a sense of everything [being] better and somehow easier’.

The judge said: ‘Simon and Clare have directly expressed the view that they will hold their mum responsible for their unhappiness if they must return to Australia.’

But he added: ‘Although I am satisfied the children are of an age and maturity at which the court should take account of their views, I am not satisfied that their wishes, feelings and preferences amount to objections to returning to live in their country of habitual residence.’

The judge said the children’s views had been ‘coloured’ by their ‘comfortable existence living with their father’, who the court heard earns up to £300,000 a year and has a hottub in the garden.

The father told the court that over the Christmas period, the children ‘became absolutely insistent that they would not return to Australia’.

After he informed the ‘ very upset’ mother they would not be coming back, she sent a series of desperate text messages. In January, she wrote: ‘The kids need to be back here’, followed by: ‘Pls bring them back’.

The court heard that, a year earlier, the father had sent his wife a text saying: ‘I hate you so much ... the truly fair outcome in this is that you get on a plane and come back to the UK and allow me to be a dad.’

He told the judge he had made applications for the children to attend a UK private school, but that they had all failed the entrance exams ‘due to the very poor educational standard that they have reached in Australia’.

The father – who used to send almost £4,000 a month to support his family – had stopped paying the mother’s mortgage leaving her ‘homeless and penniless’, the court heard. The judge suggested the father had exploited his financial advantage to win over the children.

‘The kids need to be back here’